The efficiency of solar water heating system with heat pump software application designed for resorts in Vietnam

Duy Tue Nguyen, Tri Nhut Do^*

Faculty of Engineering, Van Lang University

Received 6 March 2020; accepted 26 May 2020

 

Abstract:

Solar energy is a free and nearly endless source of energy. Because of its geographic location in the tropics, Vietnam has the advantage of harnessing solar energy for many essential purposes in order to minimize electricity usage in solar chemistry and energy conversion from solar energy into electricity or to completely replace electricity usage in such applications as heating, cooling and ventilation; water treatment; cooking process and heat process. In this paper, three solar water heating systems with heat pump are designed with softwares for resorts located at three famous tourist places in Viet Nam, named as Phu Quoc island, Bao Loc town and Sa Pa town. These places represent the Southern, the Central, and the Northern of Viet Nam, respectively. The Ecotect and Grasshopper softwares are employed with the latest measured and updated weather data, heat data and radiation data of many countries obtained from climate.onebuilding.org website. Data analysis is based on Ecotect software and computational design in Grasshopper software. The software application technology result shows that Phu Quoc island is the most efficient place to exploit solar energy, followed by such places as Bao Loc town due to the fog and Sa Pa town where solar radiation is low. In order to increase water heating efficiency in the places with very low solar radiation, a heat pump is considered to utilize along with conventional solar water heating system and the optimum Azimuth angle at the same of 180^o Southern for the solar collector is selected. This method is the efficiency solution which can be applied in Sa Pa as well as in other places in Viet Nam where lack of solar radiation. The solar energy factor (SEF) is significantly increased from 14.37 to 57.47 and the Solar Fraction (SF) per year is increased from 93.5% to 98.3% as well.

Keywords: solar energy collector, heat pump, solar water heating system.

Classification number: 2.3